Last month Microsoft unveiled the Spring Release 2018 of Dynamics 365. While there were a lot of interesting items in the announcement (Marketing, Embedded Intelligence, PowerBI Insights apps), the one that I’m most excited about is the latest release of Common Data Service (CDS), version 2.0. In this post I’ll provide my thoughts on this latest update, as well as what it might mean for the Portal capabilities of Dynamics 365.

Dates, times, time zones, daylight savings time, and anything related to those concepts is an area that has always been a huge pain in the you-know-where for developers. There are so many rules and variables that it’s hard to be confident that your solution is handling all cases perfectly. Thankfully frameworks like .NET remove a lot of the guesswork, but you still have to be careful. In this post, I’ll investigate how Dynamics 365 and Portals handle dates and times.

In order to confirm that much of the functionality in Dynamics 365 Portals works with virtual entities, I needed to have data sources with some pretty specific fields. Rather than hunting for an existing service to meet all of my requirements, I was able to quickly setup a fake OData service hosted in Azure Web Apps that I could use as my Dynamics 365 Virtual Entity Data Source.

About The Blog

Nicholas Hayduk is a licensed Professional Engineer, and the owner of Engineered Code Consulting Inc, a Regina, SK, Canada-based firm that specializes in helping companies solve business challenges with web-based solutions.

Engineered Code builds on a variety of different platforms, but some of our favorites include Microsoft Dynamics® 365/CRM, Adobe® Business Catalyst and WordPress.

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Engineered Code is a web application development firm and Microsoft Partner specializing in web portals backed by Dynamics 365. Led by a professional engineer, our team of technology experts are based in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.